In an interview with Politico on Wednesday and the Financial Times on Friday, Dmytro Kuleba, Ukraine’s former foreign minister who resigned in September after four pretty successful years in the post gave his assessment of how the war in Ukraine was going and what impact the Donald Trump presidency would have.
In his view “Both Zelensky and Putin will have the same strategy.”
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He says that each is “communicating their readiness to talk because they do not want to be the one who turns down Trump. The first one who does that loses the game.”
Kuleba said that the debate in the West over who is to blame for preventing peace negotiations and those who suggest that Ukraine was pressured by its Allies not to accept the deal that was on offer, prior to the 2022 full-scale invasion, are misguided.
Having been part of Ukraine’s negotiating team, he knows intimately what was being put forward by Moscow and says if there had been even the slightest chance to end the war in 2022 both Kyiv and its allies would have done it. In his view, President Vladimir Putin was not serious in his proposals for peace.
Kuleba said Putin’s sole aim then as now was simply to neutralize Ukraine militarily, before “making the final shot.” He gives as an example that, among the “fine print,” was a provision for all Ukrainian tanks and other heavy armor to be placed in warehouses under the control of Russian forces.
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Asked whether Russia posed a threat to the wider Europe Kuleba said he had been saying from day one of the war that if the West did not help Ukraine to defeat Russia, they would be next. Most responded by saying that they were in NATO and, therefore, Putin would not dare to attack a NATO member.
The West lacks clarity on its purpose in the Russo-Ukrainian war, has no defined strategic objective, and fails to fully understand the consequences of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, former Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said in an interview with Politico.
Kuleba’s view is that the only protection offered by NATO is the promise made by President Joe Biden that “the United States will defend every inch of the territory of our allies.” He then asks, “What if you now have a president who says he’s not going to defend every inch of your territory? … If Trump says anything like that, the NATO shield is gone, and Putin will feel free to do whatever he wants.”
He continued “Imagine that Putin dared to attack… Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia?” He said they could be occupied in hours, and it would take NATO months of heavy fighting to expel Russian forces by which time the Baltic countries would look the way Bakhmut and the whole of Donbas currently do.
Kuleba said that as foreign minister he spent a large part of his time talking to the leaders of many countries seeking support for Ukraine. He said that in most countries including those in the “global south,” there was an understanding of what Russia was doing to Ukraine but were not prepared to openly oppose Putin for fear of how he or his allies in China would respond.
Those who want to pressure Ukraine to negotiate a quick end to the war don’t understand the realities of the situation, in Kuleba’s view. He agrees that currently, things are not going well on the battlefield, but the situation was even worse in the first few months of the war. Yet he admits: “Do we today have the means and tools to turn the tables and change the trajectory of how things are happening? No, we don’t. And if it continues like this, we will lose the war.”
The core issue in Kuleba’s estimation is that Russia has a clear strategic goal as does Ukraine but “…the West, without whom Ukraine cannot win, does not know what it is fighting for,” and that this lack of strategic focus from Kyiv’s allies was, “the real tragedy of this war.”
While Russia’s ally, North Korea, sends troops to the front lines, to die in Russia’s war Ukraine’s partners still struggle to provide sufficient weapons and, in some cases, the approval to use them.
The reality is, Kuleba says, “This war will continue as long as Putin believes that Ukraine has no right to exist,” and adds that Putin “thinks he’s one step away from exposing the West as weak.”. In terms of any peace agreement, he said: “His [Putin’s] logic is: Why should I take part of it [Ukraine] if I can eventually take it all?”
Asked if Trump becoming president was a cause for anxiety, Kuleba answered, “I’m not anxious at all, because that’s not something that I can change.”
He said that as a diplomat he has learned to differentiate what people would say publicly and what they actually mean and how they would act. He feels there is a lot of noise coming from the Trump camp but it’s important to separate what the president-elect says from what those around him say.
“If you look at what Trump has been saying, he is basically making only two points. First, I will fix it. And second, Zelensky is the greatest salesman in the world.” But wonders if the Trump administration will have a strategy to deal with Putin if the Kremlin refuses to negotiate on Washington’s terms.
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